All criminals in jail, clean Parliament top priority: Modi

With a promise to cleanse the political system and Parliament from anti-social elements should the BJP comes to power, Narendra Modi on Monday said his first job as the Prime Minister would be to set up a panel to probe pending criminal cases against the new MPs.

Addressing an election rally in Hardoi, Modi said he would ensure that all offenders, irrespective of their political affiliations, were sent to jail after pleading with the Supreme Court to hear the cases against them expeditiously.

The BJP leader also referred to his recent criticism by Union Minister Jairam Ramesh to assert his views. “Main is aarop ko swikar karta hun. Modi laher nahin Modi zaher hai… Yahi zehar hai jo suddhikaran laega (I agree, there is no Modi wave, but Modi is a poison. This poison will cleanse the society from corrupts and criminals),” he told another poll rally in Etah.

Without taking Ramesh’s name, Modi said the Congress leader who made that remark has studied in foreign countries and considered himself “very intelligent”.

“(Lok Sabha) candidates submit in their form during filing nominations the details of cases against them. I will not spare even the BJP and NDA candidates,” he said in Hardoi. “No accused will dare to fight polls. Who says that this cleansing cannot happen? I have come to cleanse politics.”

Modi also trained guns at Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, SP chief’s Mulayam Singh’s family and BSP supremo Mayawati. “While the country has been destroyed by the governments of maa-beta (Rahul and Sonia), Uttar Pradesh has been destroyed by a baap-beta (Mulayam and Akhilesh Yadav) government. On one hand there is a father-son duo while on the other hand is Behenji (Mayawati) …they waste their whole tenure of five years in teaching a lesson to each other.”

Playing up his tea-vendor image in Hardoi, the Gujarat Chief Minister sought to contrast it with those “born with a silver spoon in their mouth” and made an oblique reference to his OBC origin as he reached out to voters in the Hindi heartland.

Seeking votes for the BJP, Modi in Etah asked, “Do you want a mari, tooti, sadi and hospitalised government that is running on the oxygen of a mother and her son (Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi)?” He also took on Sonia’s son-in-law Robert Vadra and asked the gathering that was there any “magician” in UP who multiplies Rs 1 lakh in the pocket of a person, who is only Class X passed, into Rs 300 crore in three years.

Modi said that the money belonged to public who were “looted” and he wanted to “return every single penny of that amount to the public”. With PTI, hardoi